


Trapped in the Amber of This Moment

by TeamAbaddon



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 03:16:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeamAbaddon/pseuds/TeamAbaddon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You beautiful creature. So bright; so perfect with all your flaws. Please wake up, you do not belong in this place.” The angel’s voice began to fade, the warmth of his touch fading until it was nothing more than the feeling of a pillow digging into Dean’s cheek – warmed by skin pressing into it all night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trapped in the Amber of This Moment

**Author's Note:**

> A short work by our dear Kieran.

A day, a moment, a thousand seconds swirling together and colliding; clashing and falling to the floor like shattered glass and the broken wings of butterflies.

Dean was hurrying; running as fast as he could over unfamiliar terrain with a heart that was trying to beat its way out of his chest. He was full; full of emotion, so much that it was welling up and trickling onto the floor. His eyes stung, lungs burning, and the acid in his legs was making his body shake with each inch of ground he covered.

There was pain, so much pain, and it was dragging him into the dark depths of an oil pit, relentlessly gripping with melting fingers and torn wide faces filled with angular, sharp teeth.

Pain, fear, and sorrow edged out into the brightness, ambling out of the shadows to grin toothless grins that looked more like snarls of hatred.

“Wake up.” Dean sat up, gasping for air as he floundered on the cold bank of an unknown lake. His heart was still pounding, body convulsing as he coughed up water. Warm hands were gripping him by the arms, and when his sight began to clear he found himself staring at the very definition of beauty.

“Where am I?” His voice was cracked, cracking, crackling like glass over fire. Ready to explode, but only just turning black.

“Somewhere you shouldn’t be.” The man stood, hauled him up like he weighed nothing, and helped him find his balance. It was cold, there was snow on the ground, and his lungs had been filled with water but he wasn’t wet. It was frightening, disorienting, and there was an ethereal beauty holding him up with a strength that stood in obscene juxtaposition to his lean frame – the body of a runner.

Dean opened his mouth to speak, to ask for the name of the man keeping him standing up right, but never got the chance to find his words. The bushes rattled, birds screamed, and the man was helping Dean sit down on the ground while his head jerked from side to side. He was all worry, twitching movements while taking off the dirty overcoat he wore and dropping it in the space between Dean’s legs.

“What are you doing?” Dean kept a steady watch on the man; he rolled his sleeves up to his elbows and took off his tie, rolled his shoulders to loosen up and waited.

Something was shrieking, growing closer. It got louder, approached them faster, and suddenly the man moved. He had a cylindrical blade when his hands had been empty before and he was slamming it into the throat of… something. Dean didn’t have a word for it; an all gray body with tattered clothes and tangled gnarls of hair.

Pointy fingers with jagged, broken nails lashed out at the stranger from all sides. But the angel – because in Dean’s mind nothing as beautiful as that man could have been anything but – only fought harder with each new wave. His movements were surgical, precise, and deadly. He rammed the cylindrical blade into abdomens and chests with pinpoint precision, his body twisting and contorting like he was dancing to a symphony that only he and the creatures he was slaying could hear.

Dean tried to keep tempo, but found himself unable to recognize the beat of the music his angel and the things were dancing to.

And suddenly, just as quickly as it had started, everything stopped. Dean was staring into the angel’s blue eyes in awe, leaning into the soft touch of fingers against his cheek.

“You beautiful creature. So bright; so perfect with all your flaws. Please wake up, you do not belong in this place.” The angel’s voice began to fade, the warmth of his touch fading until it was nothing more than the feeling of a pillow digging into Dean’s cheek – warmed by skin pressing into it all night.

Dean woke, again, with a start. He sat up, safe in bed, the dream a quickly fading memory as he climbed from under his sheets and stumbled through the room in the direction of his bathroom. He tried to hold onto the fraying edges of his dream, tried to commit the angel’s face to memory and hold onto the sound of his gravelly voice as it called him beautiful and perfect.

By the time he’d rinsed the soap from his body it was all gone, evaporated like fog on a mirror.

“I had the weirdest dream last night.” Dean was at a café, eating lunch with his younger brother. It was their Thursday ritual, his and Sam’s, to meet at that café and eat lunch together.

“What was it about?” Sam looked up from his salad with a slight grimace at the sight of Dean washing down his chili cheese burger with a gulp of Coke. It used to be beer, back when Dean still drank, but he’d quit doing that a few years before. Sam had been worried, always frowning, and Dean had worried that he’d get permanent creases between his brows.

“I don’t actually remember, but it was weird. You know how that is, when you have a weird ass dream and it’s vivid when you first wake up, but the more awake you get the less you remember about the dream.” Sam did know what Dean meant. He nodded his head solemnly before casting a glare at his cellphone that was vibrating again. He was always being bothered, even while on lunch, by the firm he’d joined shortly after leaving college.

Sam was a top notch lawyer, and Dean was proud of him.

“So you don’t remember anything at all?” Sam turned his phone off, stuffed it in the pocket of his suit jacket draped over the back of his chair.

“I remember the emotions. Fear, at first, and then awe. Peace, comfort, and then more fear.” Dean pushed a fry around in his ketchup; he remembered there was blood.

A fight; there had been a fight.

“Sounds intense.” Their conversation strayed from there; they talked about their plans for the weekend and about the upcoming trip to their hometown to visit their parents’ graves. Their sister – not by blood or even marriage – Jo would be in town when they returned and they were making plans to take her out, show her as good a time as they could in the little Southern town they’d found themselves settling in after roaming the country after the deaths of their parents.

Dean felt light hearted when they parted. He was excited to climb behind the wheel of his impala and drive with the windows down and music up.

\--

Dean was parking outside of Delany’s Irish Pub, ready to start his shift, when he caught glimpse of an overcoat and messy dark hair. His throat went dry, tongue suddenly feeling too big for his mouth, as he climbed out of the impala and stepped onto the sidewalk.

Blue eyes – not ethereal or the bluest blue to ever blue – but beautiful. Dean smiled at the man smoking outside of the bar, his dry and chapping lips wrapping delectably around the end of the cigarette and puckering just slightly as he drew in, made the lit end light up from the oxygen passing through it. Blue eyes dropped his hand to his side, held the smoke in his lungs a beat, and breathed it out into the cooling night air.

Dean walked by him, their shoulders brushing due to the crowded nature of the displaced smokers huddling up outside of the pub.

He was tending the bar, serving drinks and flirting shamelessly for tips, when blue eyes sidled up and perched on one of the only empty barstools at the end of the bar Dean was working. He leaned forward, chin resting on the heel of his hand, watching as Dean poured drinks and winked to men and women alike.

“What can I get you?” Dean stood directly in front of the man, leaning closer than actually necessary, and smiling the only real smile he’d show a customer all night. The man smiled, leaned forward just a little more, and licked his lips.

“Whiskey.” Dean almost said the stranger’s name. He knew it, instinctively, like he knew to think of him as an angel. He was beautiful; the shape of his mouth made for the slip slide of kissing and the dip in his chin perfect to guide Dean’s tongue during a heated kiss with teeth in search of a bottom lip to chew on.

Things were slipping, and Dean felt like Billy Pilgrim. But he wasn’t coming unstuck in time; he was falling into lives that weren’t his, but were.

One moment in the bar, the next in a hard bed under over starched linens with some manner of a form of Sam sleeping soundly in the bed next to his own sleeping arrangement. The glow of the digital clock on the nightstand between the beds told him it was four in the morning, and the sound of ruffling feathers and flapping wings signaled the arrival of Dean’s angel.

“You are not Dean Winchester.” The stranger – the angel Castiel – was staring at him through narrowed eyes. He was a mess, hair askew and tie backwards in an oversized overcoat and a cheap suit. Dean sat up, stared at this man, and shook his head no.

“Just stealing a moment of his life, it seems.”

“Who are you.”

“Dean Winchester. But, apparently, not the right one.” The angel opened his mouth to say more, but Dean had come unstuck again. He was slipping out, almost expecting to hear a faint poo-tee-weet as he left one reality and landed in another.

He was in an asylum; the floor black and white checked and stained with the blood of the dead bodies scattered along the corridor.

He was sitting amongst the dead, maggots and roaches falling from a hole in the ceiling – a missing ceiling tile - with his surgical glove covered fingers dancing idly through a puddle of blood.

He was tracing out a name; displacing the blood on the floor to write Castiel with the negative space left behind by his finger. It was quite dramatic, and he was laughing despite the horror of it. 

He’s on the bank, by the water, and the angel is staring at him incredulously.

“You’re back.”

“Trapped in the amber of this moment.” Dean wanted to laugh at his own joke; at the reference that fell fifty yards from his angel. Dean could almost hear him saying, in an exasperated tone, that he did not understand the reference. He wondered, very briefly, why the absence of the remark he’d imagined in his head had left him feeling disappointed.

“You shouldn’t have been here at all. It appears that matters have become difficult. I’m not sure if you can return home.” Dean should have been disappointed, but he wasn’t. He stood, brushed imaginary dirt from his pants, and looked around.

The environment around him seemed oversaturated; over photoshopped until each pixel of a picture could be counted. A horribly rendered, low quality jpeg. That was the way the world looked to him; all of it did, everything except for the angel.

“Where exactly is here?” The angel was smiling at him; a tight lipped expression that was ill practiced. It was like watching a tin soldier come to life.

“It’s the place where nightmares are born.”

“What, you mean like purgatory?” Not the purgatory you hear about in Sunday school, but the real thing. A thick forest filled with beasts who are not human, angel, or demon and don’t belong in Heaven or Hell. Dean knew this because he’d slipped, briefly, into the world of a hunter who had just made it back from purgatory. He knew who he’d been there, who he’d been in every life he’d fallen into, and that Castiel was the most important person. After Sammy, of course.

But the angel, Castiel, he had looked at Dean in awe when they’d first met. Looked at him in awe, told him he was beautiful, and sent him away. This world, this existence, it was as real as his life back home, and he did not exist in another form in this world. There was no Dean Winchester here to love this angel.

Unless there was, and they simply hadn’t met yet.

“No. Not like purgatory. This world is illusory; the other side of a fractured mirror.” Castiel was moving through the woods, and Dean was following. He was watching how Castiel carefully cleared a path with his odd sword to make sure Dean’s clothing and skin didn’t snag and rip. He was considerate, loving in a way, as he led Dean down an aimless path.

“So now I’m Alice?” He felt like Alice following the White Rabbit through Wonderland.

“Be quiet.” The command come softly; Castiel’s arm extended out to keep Dean from walking ahead of him. Dean stopped walking, mouth clamped shut as he watched Castiel grip his sword tightly, his knuckles turning white. Dean wasn’t useless in a fight, not by far, but he’d never squared off with whatever it was that was stalking them through the woods.

When they attacked – human looking things with horrid teeth; vampire was the word his mind supplied – his body moved instinctively. Like he’d been killing, hunting, these things for his entire life. His blood was thrumming through his veins as he dodged and weaved, avoiding contact with the blood drinking parasite. Castiel tossed him his sword, and Dean began to panic.

Not because Castiel meant for him to kill, but because Castiel had no weapon. 

Or so he thought.

Castiel barely touched one vampire and burned him out, leaving a dried up husk with liquidated eyes and a wide open mouth (teeth scorched beyond repair) on the ground. The fear abated, and Dean settled himself into a steady rhythm of slicing, punching, kicking, and dodging.

They moved like a perfectly orchestrated symphony. Their bodies swayed in tandem with each other, circling round as Dean took the head of one vampire and Castiel burned out another. Their backs pressed together near the end of it, and Dean could feel raw power thrumming through the warm body pressed against his own.

He found he liked it, the fight.

\--

Dean had stayed in place, not slipping for a week, but when he slipped he found himself in the asylum. He was running down a corridor, bloody knife in hand, and repeating the name Castiel over and over in his head.

It was quiet, so very quiet, and the lights above were flickering and dying out. He was in a hurry, rushing towards a room with bright lights and a surgical table. He could see Castiel on the table, blood slowly dripping down the fingers of the hand that hung over the side.

Fear and worry gripped him, and with every step the hall felt as if it were growing, becoming longer. It took him forever – possibly years – to reach the room. Castiel was barely conscious, his eyes stuttering open at the sound of Dean groaning out his name as if he were in pain.

“I finally found you.” Dean was leaning over the angel, fingers trembling as he cupped Castiel’s face. Castiel was smiling when his eyes closed and his chest stopped rising with each difficult breath he took. Dean screamed out, buried his face in Castiel’s chest and cried.

He hadn’t made it on time, and he was slipping.

Shifting to purgatory. Life outside, back with Sam and Castiel, had been a lie. It had been a Djinn; he’d given Dean such a realistic dream of being back in the fray of the hunt with Dean and Castiel at his side. Benny was laughing in the distance.

Castiel was screaming for him, fingers scrabbling against the ground as the leviathans pulled him into murky water. Dean cried out, fought against his captors, all in vain. He watched, tears painting his face as blood bubbled from the water. Castiel’s lifeless body floated to the top.

Dean was back with his angel behind the looking glass.

He had Castiel pinned against a tree, holding him up, kissing him and attempting to breathe life passed his lips, “God damn you, Castiel, not you too.” He was whispering against Castiel’s lips, feeling the life leave his guide. Castiel coughed, blood spraying from his lips.

“You perfect thing.”

“Whiskey.” Dean shook his head, closed his eyes and opened them again. The stranger, the angel, Castiel, was staring at him with a small smile, leaning across the counter.

Dean reached across the counter, took the collar of Castiel’s shirt in hand and twisted it while pulling him forward. He pressed a rough, sloppy kiss to Castiel’s lip. Quick, demanding, and sure. He leaned back, shaking as the man in front of him touched the pads of his fingers to his lips gently.

“Whiskey it is.” Dean turned his back, hand trembling as he grabbed a glass. He could see Castiel watching him in the mirror, fingers still tracing his lips, like he couldn’t believe this strange man he’d never met had just kissed him.

Dean tried to regain his composure. He slid the glass to Castiel, lingering longer than he should when he had a full bar to tend. Castiel lifted the glass, took a small sip, and placed the tumbler back on the counter top.

He watched Dean as he babied his drink, taking small sips even after the ice had melted.

He ordered three more drinks, each time with a smile, and made each one last. Night was falling, and Dean’s shift was ending. He counted out his tips, said goodbye to his coworkers, and looked for Castiel.

He didn’t see him, and with a heavy sigh he headed outside. He stepped out, prepared to climb into his car and leave with the thought that he’d never see the blue eyed angel again.

“Do you believe in love at first impromptu kiss?” Dean turned, saw Castiel leaning against the building and smoking a cigarette. Dean smiled, an honest and genuine smile, and took a step towards the man who should have been a stranger, but wasn’t.

“I’m Dean Winchester.” He wasn’t slipping, he wasn’t unstuck in time and space. He was there, in the now, and the memories of losing Castiel in three worlds were quickly fading away as he took three, four, five steps closer so he was standing in front of the man he’d kissed on a whim.

“Castiel Novak. Why did you kiss me?” He didn’t sound disappointed. Castiel flicked the cigarette to the ground, watching as Dean laughed with a shrug.

“Seemed like a good way to get your number.”

They kissed, trapped in the amber of this moment.

**Author's Note:**

> You can stalk our Lord and Dictator (aka the person who does 90% of all the writing for Team Abaddon) on Tumblr at [cockteaseofthelord](http://cockteaseofthelord.tumblr.com).


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